I shake my head at the thought, my cheek brushing against his shirt from the movement. But when Logan’s fingers go eerily still and he remains silent, not tossing back any sort of sarcasm or banter with me, I tense, suddenly wide awake.
Slowly, I shift to look up at him, finding his lips rolled inward as he stares down at me. And I see the answer in his eyes before I can even ask the question.
“I’m the only person you let see it?”
He nods, his tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek. “I mean, if I have an assignment for my art studio, then my professor and classmates see it, critique it, all that. But willingly? As in not for a grade? It’s just you.”
It’s like the bed, the floor, the entire world drops out from under me with those three simple words.
It’s just you.
Not Lexi, Bailey, Willow—his goddamn best friends—butme.It doesn’t compute in my head how no one else knows how talented he is. Or why he chose me to share it with. I literally can’t wrap my mind around it.
“How come?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s just really personal, I guess.”
For whatever reason, that simple response has my heartswelling in my chest. Painfully so. Because as honored as I am to be the one he’s let into this secret space inside his mind—the one he so easily brings to life on paper—his talent deserves so much more than that.
Settling back against him, I reach for the sketchbook again, wrapping my fingers firmly around the edge just below his own hand. My intention is obvious, despite being unspoken, but still affords him an out if he chooses to pull away.
Except he doesn’t.
Instead, he allows me to flip the page back to the previous one, revealing more scenes, more art, more pieces of himself. And after I take that one in, he lets me do it again. And again, until we silently flip through all the pages he’s completed together. It’s only when we reach the cover that he flips it closed completely and sets it on his nightstand out of reach; a clear indication that show and tell is over.
Or, at least the “show” portion.
He slides down to lie beside me, shifting so my head is tucked in the crook of his arm now rather than on his ribcage. I sling my arm over his stomach, holding him against me while his hand coasts up and down my arm in long, steady sweeps, and I work up the nerve to ask the question eating at me like a parasite.
“I promise, I’m not trying to like…poke at you, or anything. I’m genuinely asking this,” I hedge softly. “Why do you spend so much time on something that amazing if you don’t want people to see it?”
“Because it makes me happy.”
The sentence is so simple, it should be easy to accept it as the truth. But I’ve come to know Logan pretty well over the past couple months, and I can tell when he’s still holding something back. And right now, he is. I can feel it in the way his fingers press into my flesh a little more as they skate over my skin, using the connection to ground himself the way he has so many timesbefore.
The surprising part is when he chooses to reveal more layers, completely unprompted.
“Remember how I told you I would draw or color or whatever, back when I was a kid, hanging out at the rink while Oakley was practicing? I guess that’s when my whole…affinityfor drawing began.
“At first, I think it was a way for me to escape from what was happening around me. To forget that I wasn’t my brother. Wasn’t the kid my dad wanted.” His hand moves up, sinking into my hair again, playing with the strands absently while he continues. “Dad hated me drawing, though, even when I was little. I mean, you heard him at the banquet. And while I think he did that in hopes I’d give it up when I got older, I kept doing it. Probably because I knew he hated it, if I’m being honest. But then somewhere along the way, I started to really enjoy it too—creating something from nothing with just my imagination and a pen.”
I’d had a feeling a lot of this stemmed from his dad, but hearing the confirmation from his lips doesn’t make it any easier to digest. And though I’m not really a violent person, it kinda really makes me wanna deck Travis Reed in the face.
I turn my face toward him and press a kiss to the inside of his shoulder before whispering, “You probably grew to love it because, deep down, you know how talented you are. Even if you’re too humble or stubborn to admit it.”
“Yeah, well, you know talent doesn’t always compute to a career. Otherwise all your teammates would be going pro with you,” he mutters before tapping my head, playfully adding, “And, I mean, they don’t call us starving artists for nothing.”
“You wouldn’t starve,” I admonish with an eye roll. “And you know what else they say? If you do what you love, you never work a day in your life.”
“Yeah, I don’t remember that one from your philosophy coursework.”
“Okay, smartass,” I murmur, poking him in the side. “Who knows. If you did publish it, you could inspire some other little kid just like you to do the same thing one day.”
A few beats of silence pass, and during them, I think he’s actually considering what I’m saying as an option. A possibility that he could be the very thing to others that his dad and uncle were to kids like me, just in a different way. Hisownway.
But then he sighs and says, “I don’t think so.”
I groan, burying my face against his shirt while a wry chuckle leaves me. “My God, you’re the most oppositional person I know.”
